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Ukraine has developed a fully automated electronic National Cadastre System that maps all land parcels in the country and allows public access to land information for the first time ever

The launch of the first ever fully automated electronic National Cadastre System in Ukraine is a breakthrough in the area of land management system in Europe’s largest country. Though Ukraine had initiated the Rural Land Titling and Cadastre Development Project as far back as 2004, its actual implementation took place over the last year owing to an incredibly fast pace of work. The primary goals of the $50-million project, collaboration between the national government and the World Bank, were to formalise rural land for free and develop the cadastre system in particular to create full-fledged technical infrastructure and a new mapping layer, as well as to develop software, and prepare and digitise existing data.

The National Cadastre System includes information layers such as boundaries of human settlements, terrain contour lines, cartogrammes of steepness and heights, and agro-industrial soil groups

The new cadastre registration system is operating since the beginning of this year in all 549 territorial offices of the State Agency for Land Resources of Ukraine, whose official staff list includes about 12,500 employees, of which about 2,000 are cadastre registrators.

The project includes aerial photography of the entire country, mapping of boundaries of all administrative and territorial units, and index cadastral and orthophoto mapping. All land parcels have been mapped and linked to their respective information, including scanned title documents.

Since 2013, Ukraine has ushered in a uni- fied coordinate system as against the earlier practice of thousands of varied local coordinate systems. In order to collect all the parcels, a unique software had to be developed to recalculate data from any local system into the national coordinate system in a matter of seconds. Tremendous work on data digitising was carried out during the six months prior to the launch of the project. More than 120,000 sheets of topographical maps in the scale of 1:10 000 and 1,600 sheets of maps in the scale of 1:100,000 were scanned. Then there were 40,000 sheets of graphical materials to mark boundaries of administrative and territorial units, 40,000 sheets of agro-industrial soil group maps and 17 million state deeds or 34 million pages (about 1 million pages per day).

The process also enabled the authorities to correct the errors contained in the poor quality maps and data that were accumulated during the 20-odd years of Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union.

The National Cadastre System includes information layers such as boundaries of human settlements, terrain contour lines, cartogrammes of steepness and heights, and agroindustrial soil groups. The Public Cadastre Map Web Portal shows all land parcels in the country, thus allowing public access to land information for the first time ever in the country. The map is quite simple to use: there are several parameters for search — using cadastral number or parcel’s location. The map gives information about the cadastral number, form of ownership, designated use of the land parcel and its area. Personal data of land owners are hidden though.

The primary feature of the cadastral map is its feedback system. If a citizen identifies any error with regard to a land parcel, he/she may submit an official application online for correction.

The website has already become one of the most popular state web-pages in Ukraine. For the first three months, more than 1.5 million unique users visited the portal, of which 13,000 users left their online applications for errors correction. Over the same period, more than 200,000 new parcels were registered in the system. The average time for registering a new land parcel has been reduced to an average of 30 minutes from the earlier time lag of several weeks. At present, the system registers over 5,000 land parcels per day.

The Government of Ukraine is planning to develop the infrastructure of geospatial data on the basis of land cadastre system and looking for new partners and sponsors.

The Public Cadastre Map Web Portal shows all land parcels in the country, thus allowing public access to land information for the first time ever in the country